Wait until we have to explain why the most powerful military and politically influential country in the world still insists in using counter-intuitive measurement systems.
Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
851–860 of 1001 posts
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#852I find the implication that aliens are rational and have no subrational concepts due to tradition and habit interesting, as it sort of implies that these kinds of outgrowths are not necessary and can just be done away with. The narrator starts from a position of not wanting to legitimize or historicize beyond reductive statements like "some ancient civilization did XYZ". I'll admit that I skimmed through the last par…
I'm also not a fan of the "alien-who-is-really-the-writer has an objectively superior and judgmental perspective" genre, even when it's trying to be funny. Some movies: K-PAX was one, Powder, another.
It's just a rhetorical mechanism to deliver critique in a format that is entertaining and not too dry.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#853This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week /Officially/ almost everyone has standardized on ISO 8601 where Monday = 1 and Sunday = 7. But unofficially, not really. The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada, and probably some other parts of the English-speaking world. A quick check of Wikipedia suggests…
In Chinese the weekdays are also numbered and indexed to Monday: Monday = 星期一 xingqi yi (1), Tuedsay = xingqi er (2), all the way down.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#854This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…
> the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; Here in Norway we use 24 hours when writing; but we use 12 hour system when speaking - if that makes any sense? I.e. we would say: "Vi spiser middag klokka fem (5)" [We eat dinner at five o'clock]; but we'd write it with 17 typically. We never use the terms AM/PM but can occasionally specify daytime/nighttime if it's uncertain which…
I guess that's what he meant by "sometimes conversationally"?
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#855Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument isn't generally that "Jesus" isn't a person, but rather probably built off one person, but also a collection of stories about people who might be other persons or made up. There were lots of messiahs at the time, and considering that the first gospel was probably written a good 20-to-60 years after the protagonist's death, it seems reasonable to many to presume that some the stories might be stories abou…
For the record, I'm an atheist that just happens to be interested in biblical archeology and philology. I got no skin in this debate though. There is very little question that Jesus the human being and Roman subject existed, professed some sort of fanatical messianic religious messages, and got executed for it. Stronger than any evidence for Jesus directly is the evidence for the existence of his brother, James, who…
To me your phrase 'skin in the debate' sums up my feelings about the debate we're having here.
I feel that everyone who wrote historically had skin in the debate and as such I mentally categorise them the same way I treat almost every journalist today. Writers are motivated to choose every word carefully to convince people of their opinions. They mention or exclude people and events for various reasons.
The more polarising the subject the less I trust anyone's words, even twenty centuries later.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#856This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…
> - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; For German speaking countries: rather always #. In fact, you don't even say 3 PM. Just "drei". I think everything from 8 AM to 7 PM is considered "business hours" - and everything else needs clarification ("4 in the morning"). And we call 0:00 "…
I live in Germany and I have the exact opposit experience from everything you just said. the only people that use "drei" or "halb fünf" etc. are those one generation older than me, and everyone says "null Uhr" or "vierundzwanzig Uhr" (depending on which day-crossing you're referring to), I have honestly never before heard the phrase "12 Uhr Mitternacht". "Die Party geht bis 24 Uhr" oder "..bis 0 Uhr". Nobody says "die Party geht bis 12 Uhr Mitternacht", do they?
I guess it depends on where you live exactly in D/A/CH shrug
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#857Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not familiar with that nursery rhyme, but it sounds like it's based on the same misunderstanding that lead to ISO 8601.
I’m actually really interested in this. Clearly in Jesus’s time the Hebrew week went Sunday–Saturday. That definition remained at least for long enough to make into Ecclesiastical Latin and further into, e.g., Portuguese (segunda-feira, etc.). So why does ISO 8601 go Monday–Sunday? Was it codifying existing practice in Europe? When did that practice begin? Was America colonized before Europe switched to Monday–Sunday…
I live in Europe and I never learned anything other than that Sunday is the first day of the week. It's only very recently that I'm starting to notice an insistence that Monday is the first day. From my perspective, ISO 8601 seems to be the cause of that, and having an ISO standard on your side is certainly strengthening that position, but I think it's simply wrong.
Of course ISO 8601 didn't just drop out of thin air, but what caused it? I think it's a misunderstanding mixed with ignorance. Ignorance of the fact that the Jewish Sabbath, referred to everywhere in the Bible, is on Saturday, combined with people reading in the Ten Commandments about observing the Sabbath on the last day of the week and associating that with their own church attendance on Sunday, which they then conclude must be the last day of the week.
A more thorough reading of the Bible would have set them straight, as would some knowledge about history or other religions.
I actually used to think that Monday as the first day of the week was just a corporate thing. I first noticed it when I started working and work agendas were surprisingly insistent on starting on Monday. But I figured that was because the weekend is meaningless to the work week, so why not just lump it all together at the end? And then I learned about ISO 8601 and was completely flabbergasted that this was an official standard.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#858For what it's worth, leap day is at the "end" of a year. It's just a year that starts in March—an assumption shared with several other odd properties of this calendar.
This is why September, October, November and December are named after the numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10: they are the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th month if you start the year in March, like we used to.
I always assumed that it made sense until july and august were added, which is how i explain it to children. This thread has mentioned several times that those were quintillis and sextillis or something prior. I still like my version better, it implies that emperors are egotistical.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#859This is a boring way to respond to a post that obviously tries to be funny, but I don't find it funny. There's nothing special about Gregorian calendar. It is shit and unorganized just like hundreds of other things that are shit and unorganized, and would make life easier if we could replace them with something better (which already exists, or very realistically can be designed) via absolutely massive organizational…
> all sorts of different clothes' size standards surely can be replaced by one that would actually make sense Like, imagine if those sizes were equal to some actual body part measurements (or the garment's dimensions itself, whatever) in millimetres/centimetres?
only expensive clothes have reproducible sizes. You can test this yourself. Go pick out 3 different levis jeans that are the same size that ought fit you, in different colors but the same cut. They will all fit slightly differently.
Expensive clothes that are meant to be altered will usually have better tolerances, at least in my experience.
this is one of the main reasons i refuse to buy any clothing intended to be worn outdoors from amazon, shein, aliexpress, ebay, &c.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#860Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday? Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usually considered to be from after work on Friday(or technically Saturday) until Monday starts. But when an American says "right over the weekend", do they mean Sunday, since the US week starts on Sunday? Or does the week actually start on Monday as in most places…
Obviously Sunday is the left end of the week, Saturday the right.
If that's the case then surely it should be called the "weekends" plural rather than just "weekend" singular. :P